Nursing troubles...any advice greatly appreciated!

DD is 4 months and 1 week. I have been back to work for 5 weeks. Nursing is becoming more challenging. DD will sometimes will latch and pull off over and over again. It's like she gets frustrated that milk isn't there right away. Once let down happens she nurses ok but the first min or two is work to keep her on. Is this a normal phase? Is it because she's use to easy bottle during the day? Anything I can do?

Comments (10)

Are you nursing in a quiet area? When my daughter was that age she was very easily distracted and would pop off a lot if anything else was going on around her. Also, it seems like she went through spurts where she was more or less interested in nursing for no apparent reason. Keep at it, and hopefully she will get back in the groove!

It's definitely normal for 4 month olds to be VERY distractable like pp said. Going into a quiet place can help. I'd also make sure that you're using the slowest flow possible on the bottle nipples too. I've never switched my LO off the newborn nipples.

One thing you can do is massage your breast while baby is nursing to make the milk flow a bit faster for her. When you turn the bottle upside down, you see it just drips so they don't have to really work hard for the milk. At your breAst they do have to work hard. Also at that age they do want to know what's going on around everywhere.

My baby is almost five months old, and I am having the same issue. I feel like he gets a bottle all day and then gets frustrated when I try to nurse him when I get home and on the weekends. I am feeling less confident and starting to worry that I don't have enough milk. I don't want to give up, but I find myself worrying all weekend that my baby isn't nursing long enough/getting enough to eat.

We just got over this and he is still impatient for the letdown pretty often. I just reposition him and say be patient. Other options are to either hand express or ise a pump to get the let down started or try to get the people giving him bottles to try to make the bittle have a bit of a letdown by tipping just a bit in the nipple first and then after a min or so letting it fill mire. It might be hard to get daycare to do that thoufh.

I would go thru phases of slow let down. Like a PP, massage your breast to help speed it up. Also, I would try to relax, breathe deep, and imagine the milk letting down. When I would get anxious or frustrated it didn't help anything.